Trio (2 page)

*

That Voice
concerns
 
…
well what
does
it concern? The phrase “
manque un raccord
” (“a missing link”) is used seventeen times in the French text, the translator claims on the jacket’s back flap, and a phrase rendered as “impossible anamnesis” (“anamnesis” —“recalling to mind”) returns a number of times also, as do “invincible fatigue,” “traces of effacement,” “psspss,” “take a hair of the night that bit you,” and “an invisible manitou.” The author, in a special preface to the American edition, assures us that “the structure of the novel is precise, although not immediately apparent. The different themes are intermingled. One cuts into another point-blank, then the other resumes and cuts into the first, and so on until the end.” The two themes named are “the theme of the cemetery” and “that of the gossip at the grocery.” In the cemetery, evidently, at the intersection of alleys numbered 333 and 777, on All Saints’ Day, near the tomb of the minor belletrist Alexandre Mortin, a young man called Théodore, coming to arrange and leave some chrysanthemums, meets a ghost, or walking dead man, who identifies himself as Dieudonné, or Dodo for short. Dodo, it slowly dawns, is Théo’s uncle. Maybe Théo killed him, for his money. Alexandre Mortin has a brother, Alfred, who perhaps is also called the Master; he seems to be keeping little Théodore in his house by force, according to gossip down at the grocery store, where “that otiose, never-ending story” acquires ever more characters (the servant Magnin, Mademoiselle Passe- tant, Madame Buvard, Monsieur Alphonse, many of whom we have met before in other Pinget novels, or imagine we have) and effaces itself as it goes, like a slate being covered over and over with new versions, until with the best will in the world the reader starts to feel sandy-eyed and itches to turn on the eleven o’clock news, where things are said once or at worst twice.

In such a close-knit village, the dead are not allowed to die; they continue to hold their place in the fabric of gossip, of remembrance, their deaths incidental within the pervasive dissolution of life erasing itself as it goes
 
…
Pinget locates us in the gently moldering, nowhere solid hell of communal remembering, of mutual awareness, never exact, never obliterated.

*

To a crowd gathered at New York University in October of 1981, Pinget, reading his French text in a hard-to-hear monotone, explained (as translated by Barbara Wright), “My attachment to the technique of intermingling of themes and their variations is due to the admiration I have always felt for so-called baroque music.” He is also attached to the concept of the collective unconscious:

In my eyes, the share allotted to the irrational is one of the ways that may help me to arrive at a personal “truth,” which is only to a very limited extent present in my awareness of it. This is a kind of open provocation to the unconscious. … We are all, indeed, more or less dependent on the collective unconscious, whose nature we can only glimpse by examining as best we can those manifestations of it which we perceive in ourselves.

Later in this address he spoke of his “declared intention, from the very first book, to extend the limits of the written word by replenishing it with the spoken word.” Confusion, contradiction, “all the suggestions, refutations, prolongations and metamorphoses of fragments of speech” are intrinsic to this intention; his reader will have “the impression that the book is being composed, and decomposed, under his very eye.” Not that the books were written for the eye; they are “to be listened to, rather than read.”

*

In his address at New York University, Pinget announced, “I have great respect for the present-day critical methods.” And, moreover, behind his work, with his persistent rumors of the old religion, lies a less orthodox religious impulse:

The
homo religiosus,
linked to the essential—if we admit his presence in every one of us—rebels against the lacerations produced by the succession of days, and seeks refuge in the time which knows neither succession nor laceration, that of the Word.

This comes from a beautiful statement given to the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature on the subject of “literary baggage.” “The sole ‘baggage,’” Pinget says, “that helps us to conquer chronological time and to participate in the other, absolute time, is a bouquet of texts.
 
…
Light baggage buzzing with words, which, ever since the world has been the world—and there are many legends that vouch for it—has ensured our passage, without let or hindrance, over onto the other bank.”

John Updike

TRIO

This little book is the first I wrote in prose. I had written a number of poems in my youth and I was still very much under the influence of the surrealists, of attempts to approach the unconscious; in short, of experiments made on language in what might be called its nascent state, that’s to say: independent of any rational order. A gratuitous game with the vocabulary—that was my passion. Logic seemed to me to be incapable of attaining the very special domain of literature, which in any case I still equate with that of poetry. And so it was a fascination with the possibilities, the absolute freedom of creation, an intense desire to abolish all the constraints of classical writing, that made me produce these exercises which neither the logician, nor the philosopher, nor the moralist, will find to his taste. That doesn’t mean to say that the imaginative reader will not be able to find something in them to
his
taste. A reader in love with language, and with the multifarious echoes that his emotions absorb when he is attuned to words. Hence, for him, a profusion of contradictory meanings, and the feeling of being released from the prisons of rationalizing reason.

I would like to add that this gratuitous game is here coupled with a mystifying game which gives it an appearance of serious, or let’s say secret, truth
 
…

What more can I say? This: this little volume contains in embryo all the forms taken by my later work. That is why I am grateful to Joanna Gunderson for publishing it, and for having asked Barbara Wright to translate it. She could not have chosen anyone more expert, more subtle, more faithful to the text and to its spirit.

Robert Pinget

The curé of Fantoine is an amateur. He hasn’t much of a gift for God. He’s bored. He subscribes to theater magazines. He dips into the fashionable authors. He gleans in learned vineyards. He passes for a scholar, but he’s a rotter.

The Fantoine belfry dates from the ninth century. It is extremely stylish. It’s a pity that it goes for walks at night. It can’t read. It visits the church, the village, the environs. You get used to its moods.

The inhabitants of Fantoine are hopeless. They drink. They work. They drink. Their children are epileptic, their wives pregnant.

The Fantoine postman is a wag. When he goes to the café he orders a vermouth. The proprietor asks him: “Dry?” He answers: “No; wet.” It’s always the same. When he’s finished it he goes out, saying: “Love and kisses, see you soon.” An epistolary convention.

The Fantoine crocodiles are stuffed. The cows are made of white-wood. The haylofts mumble. At midday, they shout from one street to the next, they strangle the hens, they cut the calves’ throats.

But the curé of Fantoine is bored. Luckily, someone from Agapa-la-Ville takes an interest in him and sends him a book on Cambodia. The curé buries himself in it. He’s no longer bored. He teaches himself the Khmer language. He says: “Ban, La’a, Ke mien, Yuo, Kandiet, Pisa bay, Pisa Kraya.” Likewise Khmer mythology. He says: “Vishnu, Lakshmana, Bama, Baksava Viradha, Sita, Hanuman.” Likewise Khmer art. He says: “Angkor Wat, Bayon, Neak Pean, Naga, Nang Sbek, Bam-Vong, Bam Khbach, Sayam.”

The Fantoine belfry no longer goes for walks at night. It listens to the curé divagating.

The inhabitants of Fantoine become interesting: they ape the royal dancing girls.

The forest of Fantoine becomes populated with yak demons, with Mrinh Kangveal spirits, with Banra trees. Paddy-fields cover the country. The Mekong river carries alluvial deposits.

The sacrilege is complete.

It was at this point that the curé of Fantoine made a mistake during the Consecration and said: “Hic est enim corpus Yak”
 
…

A gigantic demon sprang out of the Host, dispatched the curé, and pulverized the church.

And Vishnu the Eternal deigned to smile.

“One day, a certain person happened to be in a certain place — Manhattan, let’s say.” No, that won’t do. We must say: “A horse dealer happened to be in Bucharest just at the moment when
 
…
 
” I’d prefer: “In Vaugirard, one rainy day, my wife
 
…
 
” No. The simplest is:

Once upon a time sometime, in Manhattan, a person who was a horse dealer in Bucharest just at the moment when Vaugirard was annexed to Paris, in the rain, my wife
 
…

The result is that people don’t understand. If they are determined to look for a meaning they’ll more or less grasp that it’s a question of one and the same person. Now such is not the case. It’s a question of several persons who were each several persons, in different places at the same moment. It’s impossible to say this synthetically and with precision. One can only suggest synchronism by enumerating and linking propositions together by adverbial phrases. But the effect would be spoiled. A story must make an immediate impression. Never mind, to hell with elegance, I’ll tell it just the same.

One day in 1860, the date of the annexation of Vaugirard to Paris, at the very moment of the signature of the document, a lady who lived in Manhattan took the boat for Bucharest where she had been working as a horse dealer for two years, and waited for me near the Medici fountain.

At the same moment a Bucharest horse dealer, a real flesh and blood horse dealer who had lived in the town for two years and who was not to budge from it until his death, left Manhattan and waited for me in the rain in Paris.

At the same moment my future wife, who was waiting for me in the Luxembourg Gardens and was furious because I was late, sold a packhorse in Bucharest and left Manhattan.

So far, it’s clear. I must now say that the person from Manhattan was going to Bucharest to visit the horse dealer. The horse dealer was waiting for her. My future wife, at the fountain, was waiting for herself between the two of them. When the person had arrived in Bucharest and gone into the horse dealer’s premises—the latter was therefore visiting himself—the person kissed herself on the mouth, my wife did both (I was married by this time), and all three were in my bed.

I may add that my wife was the person from Manhattan, whom I met six months later and whom I had arranged to meet in the Luxembourg Gardens on the day of the annexation of Vaugirard. Given that while she was waiting for me she was thinking of her departure from Manhattan and of her Bucharest horse dealer, it follows on the other hand that she must have been present at the fountain six months later, for she was madly in love with me. Love does things like that, and many others, that’s a platitude. As for the horse dealer, he knew beforehand that he’d be jealous six months later. Hatred has the same effect: so he was present at the Medici fountain right from the start. My wife and her lover, when they met in Bucharest and found themselves at the same time in my bed.
 
…
But I won’t dwell on it, it’s crystal-clear.

Miss Goldwick-Baramine’s guests were late. She wandered around her apartment, checking that every object was in its place—this was important to her, as you will see. She slid open the glass door in the hall, which gave onto the underground River Menseck; not long ago it was unknown, but she owned half its course. Menseck!

Miss Bara had been a great sportswoman in her youth, and she had a passion for speleology. From the sporting point of view at first, but later from that of science. The fashion for caves, in both the literary and plastic arts, was then unknown. It was the discoveries of the speleologists that created it. Miss Goldwick, with some of her friends, was the first to embark on the adventure of the grottoes. This was the result of a wager.

The “Fifth Club,” of which she was a member, was inquiring into the childhood of its members, to pass the time at their evening meetings. When Miss Bara began her story one day, everyone’s attention was riveted. Obviously, a tale that begins: “I was born on a dunghill in Krasnodar. My mother was probably a Georgian. My father, who was a descendant of Valerius Flaccus, had abandoned her in Pomerania
 
…
 
” is bound to arouse interest. Miss Baramine never tried to make an impression, no, never. She was simple and straightforward. Her confession, which she disclosed the way one peels an orange, gradually revealed a dramatic existence. At the age of fourteen, in a factory that made mousetraps, a Kalmuk workman had violated her on a steel plate. Sickened, she had run away. She had lived for more than eight years in quarries in the Urals, feeding on Jupiter’s beard. This diet had caused her physiognomy and her whole person to become so mannish that she took a job as a railroad mechanic, and trafficked secretly in diamonds and magnesium. Next she became an innkeeper in Calabria, then a torturer in a prison, then the mother of two stillborn dogs, and finally the owner of a passport found in the sub-office of an embassy. At twen- ty-six, having come into an inheritance from one of the passport’s relations, she settled in Menseck. This was when she was introduced to the club.

After this story, her friends wanted to put her to the test: she was to lead a roped party of four people and climb the north face of the Menseck peak. Miss Bara did so, with her comrades. Halfway up the rock face she called a halt. She had observed a deep crevice on their right. Her partners agreed to go down it. No one suspected the importance of this rift. Abseiling by stages, they arrived at the bottom. The rift was the exit of a series of linked galleries which the explorers took twenty days to traverse. On the twenty-first day they arrived at the underground river.